> > Well, I took it as success rate--how many good pictures over > how many total pictures you took. > > With that criterion though, Garry Winogrand was a terrible > photographer. >
How do we know that unless we see all the unpublished frames? Cartier-Bresson reputedly shot some 16,000 rolls of film during his life - that's about 800 a year over the 50 most active years. We only ever see a few hundred of the photos. This doesn't mean the ones we never see are bad. People who have seen his contacts say that one of the most remarkable things about them is that every frame is a good photo. Something like that could also be true of the notoriously prolific Winogrand. > A good photographer is one who gets the results she wants, I do believe I said that. I am a great believer in shooting round the subject, and using as much film or pixels as necessary. But I believe in doing it intelligently rather than shooting everything in the hope that something will be good. That's why I posed the original question in the way I did. You could conceivably get more good pictures just by exposing more frames, but it doesn't mean you're a better photographer. -- Cheers, Bob
